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Let's make one thing clear right up front: Pacific Rim is not like Transformers. First off, the latter's Autobots and Decepticons are a bunch of aliens who can think for themselves, yet fight all the time like teenagers. The Jaegers of Pacific Rim are essentially massive, 25-ton exoskeletons that require human dual-pilots. They dwarf a Transformer like a human towers over an action figure of Optimus Prime.

But the most important distinction: Pacific Rim's giant Jaegers were built by humans to fight kaiju.

"Kaiju" is Japanese for "giant monster" (though it literally means "strange beast"), with Godzilla the poster boy ur-kaiju. Along with kaiju however, comes another term: mecha, which refers to a sci-fi/fantasy genre centered on robots and machines. But we're interested in a specific sub-genre of mecha: the giant fightin' robot!

Japan, of course, has been at the forefront of depicting kaiju and mecha for decadesif it's gigantic or impossible to construct in the real world because of those pesky laws of physics, Japanese film-makers have put it on screen. Pacific Rim comes from Mexico's Guillermo del Toro, director of the Hellboy and Pan's Labyrinth movies. He says Pacific Rim is not a war movie but rather a straight up adventurethe kind of film he wanted to see when he was watching Godzilla films as a kid.

So no, there's not a single Transformer in our list here. Not even Unicron. With a couple of exceptions, this list is all about giant mecha piloted by humanslike the Jaegers, such as China's Crimson Typhoon, Australia's Stalker Eureka, and the U.S.A.'s own Gipsy Danger. The outliers are those autonomous, intelligent gigantic robots that fight kaiju on behalf of mankind. In other words: good guysand a whole lot of mecha fun.

Eric narrowly averted a career in food service when he began in tech publishing at Ziff-Davis over 20 years ago. He was on the founding staff of Windows Sources, FamilyPC, and Access Internet Magazine (all defunct, and it's not his fault). He's the author of two novels, BETA TEST ("an unusually lighthearted apocalyptic tale"--Publishers' Weekly) and KALI: THE GHOSTING OF SEPULCHER BAY. He works from his home in Ithaca, NY.
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